A New Professional Learning Community

When I was a school leader, I was a big fan of Professional Learning Communities, or PLCs. Rick DuFour, superintendent and past principal of Adlai E. Stevenson High School, brought Professional Learning Community school improvement work into the national spotlight during the 1990’s. Professional Learning Communities, made up of the adult learning leaders inside a school, committed to creating a structured learning environment focused on establishing a mission, vision, values, and goals by which teaching and learning was practiced. Also, PLCs stressed three questions that drove the work inside schools:

What do we want our students to learn?

How will we know our students learned it?

And what will we do when our students don’t learn it?

Recently, Lawrence Kohn, co-founder and partner in a leadership development organization titled Leadership Partners, published an online article titled “Is it ‘PLC Time? Never!”

Kohn writes,

“I have been an English teacher, a principal, a professor, a director… As such, I rub elbows with K-12 education leaders and from the district level on a regular basis. These are courageous leaders who face intense challenges in Houston area schools and throughout Texas.”

“I interact with them on a regular basis, and while I love and admire them, I have bad news for them and all others in such leadership positions. There is no such thing as Professional Learning Community (PLC) time. No school has ‘PLC time,’ yet I hear it over and over: ‘During PLC time, we decided to enact a new instructional strategy’ or ‘We created PLC time every Thursday from 7:30-9:30.’”

“’PLC time’ is a misnomer. Professional Learning Community is not a ‘time’ that occurs in schools. Professional Learning Community is a complex organizational system a school becomes. PLC time, as currently actualized today in most schools, is simply a meeting of educators to collaborate, nothing more and nothing less. When I hear principals say, ‘We have our PLC time this week,’ I cringe. What I would like to hear is, ‘We are a PLC, or we are becoming a PLC.’ This is not just semantics. Implemented and used authentically, PLCs can be a tremendous tool to propel teaching and learning in a time when educators need all the tools they can get.”

“It is important to know some history around PLC so we can get this right. If you ask leaders about PLC, you will likely hear Rick DuFour’s name… Most know DuFour’s story of how he created an extremely high performing high school and shared how he did so through workshops, conferences, and published materials. This began in the late 90’s, and by 2010 PLC was more than a buzzword. It was what schools sought and they still do in 2024…”

“Principals and teams learned the framework and began meeting around implementation. These sessions became ‘PLC time.’ Over the years, PLC time has evolved into weekly professional development meetings or other collaborative meetings. There is nothing wrong with this mode of collaboration, except this does not make the school a viable PLC. Becoming a viable PLC is a complex evolutionary process that does not occur by attending a conference, adopting a framework, and attending weekly meetings. History shows us why.”

“The historical development of professional community may have begun in 1967 with an article published by Fred Newmann and Donald Oliver entitled, ‘Education and Community.’ Their article argued for modern schools and formal education to develop a sense of community rather than fragment the sense of community most schools displayed. Following this, researchers began to look at the difference between public schools and private schools. One finding of this work indicated a stronger sense of collective responsibility and purpose in the private schools.”

“Researcher inferred one reason private schools were marginally more successful than public schools was due to this sense of ‘community’ within the private schools. Newmann believed this might have been the birth of professional community. For his Center for Effective Secondary Schools, he commissioned Tony Bryk in 1988 to do the first quantitative analysis of communal school organizations on student achievement. Bryk studied high schools and created scales of communal measures, such as the degree of respect staff members had for each other and the extent to which they shared goals. He concluded the higher degree of communal organization that occurred in the high schools, the higher student achievement levels were. This brought more studies on bureaucratic vs. communal organizations, and more analyses of teachers occurred.”

“The question was raised, ‘What is the difference between community in general and a ‘professional community?’ From this, the definition of community, which included the notion of shared goals, expanded to shared goals for student learning. Another distinction was that within communities, face-to-face contact occurs with standard communication; in a professional community, the notion of ‘practice’ and sharing practice with colleagues via deprivatization was noted. Finally, Newmann noted the biggest distinction; within a professional community, educators engage in reflective dialogue about practice that is based on inquiry, not just observation.”

“So, based on Newmann, Bryk’s and other’s research, to become a viable professional community (PC-the word ‘learning’ was not part of the title then), a school must: 1) have shared norms and values, 2) have a collective focus on student learning, 3) engage in reflective dialogue, 4) engage in depravtization of practice, and 5) engage in collaboration. The principal’s role is to develop and support the PC as a system. There is not enough space here to explain all of the positive impacts LCs have as a system on a school, but the research is there.”

“These are not items to be accomplished in a meeting once a week. PC is a complex system that evolves carefully and slowly over time with leadership driving the work. As Karen Seashore Louis points out, ‘One problem, however, with much of this literature [on PLCs] is that it portrays the development of a PLC as an innovation to be implemented rather than as a culture change that will take years and create conflict as well as success.’ It is hard, courageous work that depends on strong leadership. And leaders need to get this right because the most precious commodity a school has is time, and bringing teachers together in the name of PLC time is not getting it right.”

“Once carefully established, each component above works in concert with the other, and the school becomes a professional [learning] community. Once this happens, time is used well with focus and precision as a system that drives improved teaching and learning. DuFour’s current PLC system certainly parallels the historical structures of professional community, but I would venture to say he might also cringe hearing ‘PLC time.’ It is not just semantics.” (DuFour died of cancer in 2017.)

Is it time for Professional Learning Communities to evolve beyond their current form? Is it time to begin building PLCs whereby young learners lead their own learning communities? Where adults serve as supporters of the PLC and not necessarily leaders?

What would a young learner-led PLC look like?

Til tomorrow. SVB